


From the Outside Looking In

by BirdStreet



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide, seriously this is immensely depressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:22:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27586048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BirdStreet/pseuds/BirdStreet
Summary: It’s not that he has a plan, exactly. He just knows that one day, maybe sooner, maybe later, it’ll happen.A short fic exploring Kutner's life. Spoilers for up to S5e20. Trigger warning for suicide.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14





	From the Outside Looking In

He’s three years old. His mom has to drag him to his first day of kindergarten; he’s terrified of being away from the safety of his own home. He cries the whole way there. By the end of the morning, when she arrives to bring him back, he’s had such an amazing time he doesn’t want to leave. He cries the whole way home. Every day from then on, he bounds out of bed as soon as he’s awoken.

He’s six years old. Now he’s big enough to help out at his parents’ store after school, three days a week. (Tuesdays he has soccer club, and Friday his dad closes up early and they all eat dinner together.) They trust him to walk there on his own – the store is only three blocks from the elementary school – and this Wednesday is no different. He sits on the floor beside the counter, sorting Hershey’s bars into stacks, then putting the stacks in boxes. It’s simple, but he loves it. When he hears the ding of the bell above the door, he leaps up to greet the customers like he always does. They’re not interested. They push past him, and he doesn’t remember the words that were exchanged. He just remembers the gunshots that sounded nothing like the ones on the TV, and he remembers the pooling of blood on the white linoleum tiles. It stains his sneakers. They were his favourite.

He’s nine years old, and Richard and Julia are celebrating his birthday with him. Birthdays have been weird since his parents died. Richard and Julia are great, and he usually loves Julia’s baking, but she doesn’t make the cake like Mom did. He eats it anyway, and it’s all but forgotten when he rips off the cyan wrapping paper and discovers a chemistry set inside. Science has always been his best subject. That’s when he knows that even if they aren’t his real parents, they’ll always try their hardest. He pushes aside Lawrence Choudhary, and becomes Lawrence Kutner.

He’s fifteen years old. He’s not at the top of his classes, but he’s pretty damn close, and when some kid called Jonathan in the grade below him tries to ask for help with his homework, he laughs in his face and calls him a dumbass. Making friends hasn’t come naturally to him, and he’s worked hard to maintain his status as something – anything – other than the orphan kid who’s a little too enthusiastic about these new Yu-Gi-Oh card things. Somehow he manages to stay in with the cool kids, even when he wins an award for his project on dark matter. The other kids mock Jonathan for being weird. He joins in, he hates himself for it, and he carries on.

He’s twenty one years old. Despite never being the smartest, his creativity and outside the box thinking has landed him at Berkeley on a scholarship, studying Physics. He throws himself into his degree full force. He’s not sure he’s stopped _doing_ since he was six years old. When he’s _doing,_ he doesn’t have to think. Weekends are spent playing video games with a couple of his classmates, and occasionally getting obscenely drunk at the local bar. He’s as close to happy as he thinks he’ll ever be.

He’s twenty five years old, and now he’s a Proper Doctor. He’s specialising in Sports Medicine at Colorado, and has made a name for himself as the guy who’ll try anything once. His mom and dad call twice a week, and he’s always more than happy to talk for upwards of an hour about how it’s going. He tries very hard not to think about his other mom and dad. One spring break, he goes to a comic convention with a fellow student, and he feels like he belongs. He’s always had a complicated relationship with belonging.

He’s twenty eight years old. He sees an ad online for a fellowship with Gregory House, and he immediately applies. House is brilliant, a genius even – he thinks and operates outside the box, and seems to actively encourage others doing the same. When he shows up, there are several dozen other people vying for two spots on the team, but he doesn’t stay discouraged for long. He’s always been determined. On his first day, he inadvertently sets a patient on fire. By some miracle, he manages to come up with a spectacular theory on the case, and House lets him stay. He’s relieved. Sitting at home staring at the wall takes his brain to places he’d prefer it didn’t.

A few weeks later, there’s a patient with some weird syndrome where he mirrors the mannerisms and attributes of those around him. The patient seems to think he’s a masochist. His case isn’t helped when he ends up using the defibrillator too hastily, and electrocutes himself. He really isn’t a masochist, though. He just doesn’t mind pain when it happens. It’s like the time he streaked at the Penn-Dartmouth match, or the time he drank ten cups of coffee in a row, or the time he broke that world record. It’s an adrenaline rush. It reminds him he is alive, that he can enjoy life, that things can be felt and experienced and not everything is bleak. He finds that he’s been struggling more than usual to remember that lately.

He hangs out with the other applicants in his spare time. They find him annoying but ultimately endearing, kind of like an overeager puppy nipping at their heels. When he’s not busting his ass trying to come up with the most obscure diagnosis he can, or out watching whatever performance is on at the local theatre with Cole or Cutthroat Bitch, he sits at home and plays video games. He’s always favoured virtual escapism over drink, or drugs, or anything else destructive. He likes to pretend he’s someone else; really, he’s felt like he’s played someone else his whole life.

Amber dies. He’s no stranger to death, but it never gets any easier. He copes the way he always has. He throws himself into his work, into cosplaying, into gaming, into everything that makes him feel as alive as everyone else thinks he is. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that if he stops and _thinks_ about what’s happened to his ex colleague, what happened to her body as her organs shut down, the pain that all her loved ones will never stop feeling, he’ll crumble. Crumbling isn’t an option.

He’s twenty nine. He spends his birthday in his living room, playing the new Grand Theft Auto and eating leftover takeout pizza. Mom and dad ring. He finds himself missing them. He finds himself missing the family he never had a chance to have.

There’s another patient. She’s Chinese and was adopted by a white family as a baby, so obviously he gets it. She’s struggling, and he opens up – just a little. (Sometimes being open is the best way to keep things buried. No-one ever thinks he’s hiding anything when he talks candidly about the tough times.) He tells her that he likes being different. That the view’s better from the outside looking in. He means it. He just isn’t sure he believes it.

The patients keep getting to him. There’s a kid who’s so ashamed of herself that she lies about her parents being dead, and then abusive, in order to avoid them being contacted about her illness. He knows it’s complex, and he knows she’s gone through hell no matter what. But he can’t stop himself feeling a knife of jealousy straight to his gut when, teary eyed, she’s reunited with her parents at the end of the day. He never got that. He never will. He’s not sure what he sticks around for, some days.

Another girl has been relentlessly bullied, and he remembers what he did to Jonathan. He never threw punches or kicks, but ostracism was just as bad. The guilt gnaws at him, and he knows he needs to make things right. He’s starting to realise things will never be okay, and he wants to make amends in case it ends up being his last chance.

It’s not that he has a _plan_ , exactly. He just knows that one day, maybe sooner, maybe later, it’ll happen. A suicidal chronic pain patient comes in, and he can’t figure out which kind of sign it is. He successfully diverts any attention away from himself and onto Taub, whose baggage around the topic isn’t all too subtle. They solve the case, and by this point he’s figured out that it was more personal for his colleague than he’d let on. Taub denies it, of course, but he knows that denial is far from proof.

The more time that passes, the more he realises this is what he has to do. Life has always been particularly dark, but he’s filled it with his own brightness and sparks and joy. They’ve been real, they’re real, happy memories, but they’re permeated with this blanket of despondency that’s lingered near him for as long as he can remember. Lately the blanket has been getting tighter. He knows in his soul it’ll never go away; not really.

Two weeks before the date he’s set, their patient has an alleged psychic cat that predicts deaths. Everyone thinks he’s being stupid and superstitious when he panics after he finds the feline asleep on his backpack. He laughs it off in front of his colleagues, and all the while wonders if it somehow _knows_ what’s coming.

House spits a mouthful of cranberry juice onto his shirt. It's a joke; of course it's a joke. House's entire modus operandi is pranks. It doesn't stop him from remembering the blood on the tiles, though, the ruined sneakers. It reminds him he's making the right decision 

He lets Taub take the credit for his rat poison idea with the guy with locked-in syndrome. It’s not like he’ll be using it. Taub’s always been a good guy, if a mess in his personal life, and he feels almost guilty for pretending everything’s fine when he leaves work that day. A tiny part of him wants to stand in the entrance hall and scream, scream at the top of his lungs that nothing will ever be okay and by Wednesday he’ll be dead but he doesn’t want to die, not really, but he doesn’t. He’s spent the last few weeks getting everything in order. It’s too late to back out now.

He’s going to call in sick Wednesday and take the day writing notes, clearing out his email inbox, straightening it all up before _it_. That’s been the plan for a fortnight. He spends Tuesday night lying awake, somehow feeling every feeling he’s ever bottled up since he was six years old, and feeling nothing at all, all at once. It’s overwhelming, it’s disorientating, and he’s reached breaking point. He can’t wait until tomorrow. He sends off a single message to Taub about his non existent dog, and some stupid trivial reply to his college roommate who wanted opinions on his Star Trek costume.

He supposes it’s always going to have ended this way.

He has always been on the outside, looking in.

And then there’s nothing left to think.

**Author's Note:**

> WOW I am sorry that was incredibly emo and dark. I wrote this in one sitting at four in the morning and I haven't edited it at all. It's entirely self indulgent and angsty, and I hope you enjoyed (????maybe not the word) if you read. Take care of yourselves.


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